ABC's Election Analyst blogs on the wonderful world of Australian Elections.

September 10, 2012

The Greens versus Labor - Geographic and Educational Dimensions

In recent years the Labor Party has been challenged in some of its safest seats by rising support for the Greens.

Not all Labor seats have been under challenge, just those inner-city seats that were once Labor's heartland. This is the arc of once grimy inner-city industrial seats that have been transformed in recent years by gentrification.

That Green support is related to something other than just the level of Labor support is revealed by the following graph based on 2010 Federal election results. The graph plots the Green first preference vote on the vertical axis against the Labor 2-party preferred percentage displayed along the horizontal axis.

The predominantly Coalition electorates are to the left of 50% in the area shaded blue, while the underlying Labor electorates are to the right of 50% and shaded red. I have used the 2-party preferred vote because it is better than first preference vote in boiling electorates down to a measure of underlying 'Laborness' versus the Coalition.

In scatter diagrams such as the one above, it is common to plot a trend line that would show the relationship between the Green first preference vote and the Labor 2PP%. In this case I have not because the data does not justify it.

If you look across the graph, the spread of Green percentages increases from left to right. The data displays something called heteroscedasticity, the variance of the Green percentages is not constant across the graph and is in fact correlated with the Labor 2PP%. For all levels of Labor 2PP% there is an enormous spread of Green votes, and this spread increases left to right with increasing Labor 2PP%. An upward sloping trend line in this data is created by the increasing variance, not by a relationship between Green vote and Labor 2PP.

At the far right of the graph there is a massive range in Green first preference percentages, from high values in inner city seats such as Melbourne, Batman and Wills, to very low values in equally safe Labor electorates such as Gorton, Lalor and Scullin. What this suggests is that there is something other than simply Labor support that creates a difference in Green support in safe Labor electorates.

The obvious description but not explanation is the inner versus outer city divide. I have already alluded to the Green challenge being strongest in former industrial seats where gentrification has been heavy.

Professor Simon Jackman of Stanford University very helpfully mapped the pattern of Green first preference percentage by polling place for the 2010 election. The map for the Melbourne metropolitan area is shown below. You can click on the map for a slightly larger version. (You can look at a large number of his maps at his website, http://jackman.stanford.edu/oz/Aggregate2010/content/index.php)

The graph clearly demonstrates the inner-city concentration of Green support. In the case of the Melbourne metropolitan area, the dark coloured dots representing high Green support basically disappears at the end of the tram lines. Safe inner city Liberal electorates also have higher Green support than equally safe outer-suburban Liberal electorates.

I'm not suggesting that catching trams makes you vote Green. Nor does density of residence, or the prevelance of flat, apartment and terrace dwellings, two other variables heavily correlated with Green support. An inverse correlation also exists between Green support and the proportion of households owning two or more cars.

Again you see a high concentration of Green support in inner-city Labor electorates that were once working class but are now heavily gentrified. Again, as in traditional Liberal seats in Melbourne's east, so there are above average Green votes in long-established Liberal voting areas on Sydney's north shore. Outer-suburban electorates in the west and south, of both Labor and Liberal hue, demonstrate relatively low levels of Green support.

None of this is a surprise to anyone with a bit of knowledge of sociology or academic work on voter behaviour. There is substantial literature in political geography about the politics of place, and economic class and income variables have always played an important part in sieving people into suburbs where they can afford to live. Beyond economics, values can play a part in whether people want to live in relatively crowded inner city residences or larger seperate dwellings in the outer suburbs. You can see how both factors interplay in the pattern of Labor support and the types of seats where the Greens poll strongly.

The variable that comes up most commonly in explaining the rise of centrist and leftist third parties in Australia in the last three decades is university education. Survey data starting with the Australia Party in the late 1960s, through the Australian Democrats from the 1970s and now with the Greens, show these parties have drawn support disproportionatly from amongst the ranks of university educated voters.

This relationship from survey data is equally demonstrated in the next graph, which plots Greens first preference percentage by electorate against the proportion of an electorate's adult population with a University degree.

Here you see the explanation of the wide ranges of Green support at all levels of Labor 2PP support. I've coloured points red or blue based on whether the seat is Labor or Coalition held. As you can see, with both Labor and Liberal seats, the level of Green support rises with the proportion of an electorate's population that is University educated.

Clearly demonstrated is the big difference between the three safe Labor Melbourne electorates with huge Green votes, Melbourne, Batman and Wills, and the three equally safe Labor seats with low Green support, Lalor, Gorton and Scullin. The three outer suburban seats are clustered bottom left, low in University educated residents and low in Green support, while the inner-city electorates lie in the opposite corner, high in both Green support and proportion university educated residents.

This isn't saying going to University makes you vote Green. A University education often leads to higher income as well, which gives people greater opportunity to choose where they live. As with all social data, there are lots of inter-relationships going on which does not justify simplistic 'x causes y' analysis.

In 1970s Dr David Kemp wrote about the tendency of the university educated to be less accepting of the Coalition as the party of the established order, but also how the university educated were also not a natural fit for the traditional party of labour.

To some extent the success of Gough Whitlam was to move Labor away from the working class rut it was stuck in for two decades after the war. Policies such as free university education brought middle class radicalism into the Labor tent. Specific shifts in policy to appeal to women and migrants also changed the Labor brand, and Labor has been more successful in the last three decades since than at any time in its history.

Where in the 1970s academics argued about class and politics, in the 1980s there was much analysis of voters with 'post-materialist' values. These voters were less likely to vote on traditional economic lines and more drawn to issues like the environment and individual rights. In the media this often gets trivialised into talk about "doctor's wives".

Perhaps Labor's success in recent decades has made it part of the establishment that post-materialist voters reject. At the moment it is Labor that finds itself most divided between the old politics it needs to fight the Coalition in outer-suburban seats, and the new politics it needs against the Greens in the inner-city.

The word 'heartland seat' gets tossed around a lot in relation to Labor's current problems. But seats like Melbourne and Grayndler are no longer 'heartland' seats: they are far too affluent compared to the days when the qualified as heartland for Labor. The Sydney state seat of Balmain may be the birthplace of the NSW Labor Party, but it is now one of the country's best educated and most affluent electorates. It moved out of Labor's heartland along with the dock workers and labourers many years ago.

In his book "Society and Electoral Behaviour in Australia", published in 1978 but largely written before the 1977 election, future Liberal cabinet minister Dr David Kemp devoted a chapter to the 'knowledge elite', the new class of university educated electors. He pointed out how they were less attracted to the parties of the established order, the Liberal and National Parties. Kemp speculated on how the knowledge elite could be attracted to new third parties that in future could change politics by gaining the balance of power in the Senate. In a postcript written after the 1977 election, he noted the rise of the Australian Democrats in this light.

Kemp also wrote extensively in the book about the declining class ties of voters as they shifted from traditional working class enclaves of the inner-cities to the less cheek-by-jowl existence of the outer suburbs. At the time the reverse flow of affluent voters moving into the old inner-city suburbs was in its infancy.

While Kemp speculated on the impact a knowledge elite might have on the Senate balance of power, no one had predicted that it would be concentrated enough to actually elect members to the House of Representatives.

As I've explained in this post, Labor and the Greens are not engaged in a battle over Labor heartland. Labor, like the Liberal Party, has a broad social base. Survey data suggests the Greens social base is narrower and heavily concentrated amongst the 'knowledge elite' to borrow Kemp's term. The geographic concentration of that group throws Labor and the Greens against each other in contests for electorates that the Coalition could never win.

The problem for the Labor Party is that in trying to hold on to its inner city seats, it can often alienate its outer suburban base. Trying to hold on to Batman, Melbourne and Wills is important, but for the Labor Party Gorton, Lalor and Scullin are just as important even if they are off the Green radar. Even more important are marginal seats where Labor must battle the Coalition and the only Green input is preferences.

For many years the Labor Party has been hollowed out by loss of membership. In contrast the Greens have had a healthy membership and beavered away at the grass roots competing in local government contests. For a decade the Greens have slowly been supplanting Labor in inner-city councils in Sydney and Melbourne.

On the weekend the NSW Greens suffered their first significant setback with the a substantial loss of support in inner-city councils. The Labor Party went to some effort on Sunday to trumpet this decline, and were successful in convincing some of the national media that this was the big story from the local government elections.

But as I've pointed out in this article, there is a big difference between inner and outer suburban Labor seats. Labor got its story out on the local government results, diverting attention from the far less rosy Labor results in the outer suburbs where national elections are decided.

The number of seats the Greens have any realistic chance of winning has always been small. The number of outer suburban seats that Labor could lose to the Coalition is much greater and is by far the more important story in the weekend's NSW local government elections.

Comments

Maybe I am naive, but when did local council elections in Australia become a party based affair? I do follow politics and have read the Australian constitution. I live in WA, and to the best of my knowledge there has never been party based council elections here.
Again I am not ignorant not to appreciate that candidates don't have political bias's and leanings. Can you please enlighten me as to these questions?

Also why don't you ever cover local council elections that are outside the eastern seaboard, because no-one really cares what happens outside our own state, and NSW is not the centre of the universe.

COMMENT: I cover local government elections where parties are involved as this allows me to add value to information published by the various electoral commissions. Parties contest local government in metropolitan NSW, in parts of Melbourne and in Brisbane. Local government elections elsewhere are non-party affairs.

In addition, the Queensland and NSW electoral commissions make the data available in a form that allows me to publish results. There would be no point me even attempting the same task in WA as there are no parties and there is no data supplied on election night.

Your interesting analysis appears to be based on the House of Reps 2PP vote. What about the Senate vote. I have noted that (1) the Greens senate vote is consistently higher than the HoR vote and (2) there does not appear to be a clear relationship between the Greens HoR and Senate votes - at least in Victoria.

COMMENT: I completely disagree. There is a 97% correlation between the Greens' House and Senate vote in Victoria in 2010, and if you do a regression of the Senate vote against the House vote, you get a 0.94 r-squared value. You don't get stronger relationships than that. In other words, if I used the Senate Green vote instead of the House, I would get exactly the same analysis.